Advances in microbial engineering for the production of value-added products in a biorefinery

Microbial biorefineries to produce chemicals from renewable feedstock provides attractive advantages, including mild reaction conditions and sustainable manufacturing. However, low-efficiency biorefineries always result in an uncompetitive biological process compared to the current petrochemical process. Thus, improving microbial capacity to maximize product yield, productivity, and titer has been recognized as a central goal for bioengineers and biochemists. The knowledge of cellular biochemistry has enabled the regulation of microbial physiology to couple with chemical production. The rapid development in metabolic engineering provides diverse strategies to enhance the efficiency of chemical biosynthesis pathways. New synthetic biology tools as well as novel regulatory targets also offer the opportunity to improve biorefinery environmental adaptivity. In this review, the recent advances in building efficient biorefineries were showcased. In addition, the challenges and future perspectives of microbial host engineering for increased microbial capacity of a biorefinery were discussed.